How do I Choose the Best Cupboard Pulls?

Choosing the best cupboard pulls should take your budget as well as the overall style of your home into account. Although cabinet handles and drawer knobs are relatively small, functional accent pieces, they do tend to stand out against kitchen or bathroom cabinet doors. Picking cupboard pulls in a color, shape, size and design that coordinate well with your cabinets can improve the overall look of your room.

Take a good look at your cupboards to determine what type of hardware would be the most attractive. If your cabinets are too plain in design, choosing detailed, decorative cupboard pulls may be best. These styles include tiny metal sculpture-like pulls shaped like dolphins, spoons and many other motifs. Hand-painted ceramic pulls in colors and motifs that suit the theme or mood of your bathroom or kitchen are another interesting choice.

If instead, your cupboards already have a lot of detail such as a scallop or molding trim, a plainer pull or handle may be a better option. Depending on your preference, a plain, silver-toned ball-shaped pull or a thin handle could work well on these kinds of cabinets. Keeping the overall look of the finished cupboard in mind and how that will affect the rest of the room is important. For instance, if the pulls and cabinets create a very detailed appearance, but the rest of the room is sparsely designed, the overall decor may seem inconsistent.

The size of a cupboard pull or handle should fit different hand sizes as well as the scale of the cabinet. For example, smaller bathroom cabinets usually suit small cupboard pulls, but if the hardware is too tiny, larger fingers may have difficulty opening and closing the doors. Cupboard handles should have a large enough opening to fit large men's hands. Pay attention to the measurements given for cabinet handles and knobs in catalog descriptions so that you can measure the approximate dimensions on your cupboards before purchasing any pulls.

The size as well as the material a cupboard pull is made of usually relates strongly to its cost. Of course, larger pulls typically cost more than smaller ones in any material. Plastic knobs and handles tend to be the lowest price while wooden varieties may be only slightly more, depending on their detail. Metal knobs are usually moderate to the most expensive; this will depend on their overall design and finish. Fancier cupboard pulls such as sparkling, faceted crystal tend to be pricey, but can also bring a lot of visual impact to kitchen or bathroom cabinets.